The Hot Snow

In the middle of this novel a Soviet general is summoned to the Kremlin, and Stalin asks whether he has always had his own point of view. Then the trap closes: "Presumably your doubts had to do with certain military leaders whom we punished at one time?"

Bessonov feels as though he had moved closer to an icy wind, realises he has been forced to speak of something he had no intention of mentioning, and says it anyway - that those commanders were the victims of slander, and of that he is sure. Stalin pushes the pipe away as if it were an intrusive object. The excesses were put right long ago. Rokossovsky and Tolbukhin are fighting well at Stalingrad.

And Bondarev gives his general the thought he cannot say: What about the others?

That exchange is on page 131 of a book Progress put into English in 1971, the year after Tvardovsky was forced out of Novy Mir. It is the reason to read this novel now.

The rest is Stalingrad in December 1942, an anti-tank battery through a single night and day, written by a man who had been in one. The battery is memory and the Kremlin is imagination. The battery is better; the Kremlin chapter could not have been written ten years earlier or, quite possibly, ten years later.

Progress Publishers, Moscow, Soviet Novels Series, first printing 1971. Translated by Robert Daglish.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.